Feathers fly as Henry's two-timing mate gets the bird

When female osprey, EJ, flew back to the UK with a new mate, VS, after her epic spring migration from West Africa, birdwatchers knew the feathers would fly.

She set up home in the nest she had used year after year and very soon she was incubating two new eggs and looking forward to raising a new family.

But when her usual mate, Henry, arrived back in the country after his 3,000 mile migration he was rather distraught at the new domestic arrangements at his nest.

He flew into an almighty rage and deftly kicked one egg out of the nest and peered over the edge to watch it smash on the ground below.

He botched his attempt to do the same to the second egg which was left nestled precariously in the twigs of the nest high in the tree tops.

Having decided he was not prepared to bring up another man's children, Henry then immediately mated with EJ and then went fishing.

Observers at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) watched in awe as the avian melodrama began to unfold before them.

Richard Thaxton, manager of the RSPB site at Loch Garten, Scotland, said: "A packed house at the Osprey Centre held their collective breath and watched in horror as our worse fears were realised.

"Henry, on seeing the two eggs in the nest-cup, deftly kicked one right out of the nest to smash below the nest and the other was kicked too, lodging precariously on the rim of the nest. We were all stunned to see this."

"Clearly he sensed that these eggs weren't his either, and he's not going to bring up another birds chicks. It's not impossible that these two might now go ahead and have another clutch of eggs in a couple of weeks, but it's quite unusual, so this is really disappointing."

He explained that experts had initially hoped Henry and EJ would meet up and do what comes naturally and Henry would accept the eggs as his own.

But Henry clearly sensed something was wrong and, although VS has been conspicuous in his absence, he decided to get rid of them.

Mr Thraxton said: "Henry is a much more reliable male osprey, a good provider of fish and something of a hero really. He would always be our male osprey-of-choice, if we had anything to do with it.

"EJ has a good breeding record, but VS is known to be something of a rogue, having disrupted breeding at the Loch Garten nest site in recent years, two-timing EJ with a female of his own at a nest of his own elsewhere."

Since Henry's return, EJ has laid two new eggs but after coming back from a fishing trip he kicked them out of the nest too.

Ospreys usually mate for life and almost always return to the same nesting site following their spring migration to raise a new clutch of three or four chicks.

Fish-eating ospreys were wiped out as a nesting species in Britain during the 18th and 19th centuries as a result of persecution by people, the final pairs being killed during the early 1900s.

However, with more enlightened modern attitudes to birds of prey, backed up by protection laws, ospreys have been nesting again since the 1950s, with Loch Garten the launch pad for a revival.

Since then more than 70 young have been reared at the eyrie and more than two million people have visited the RSPB centre overlooking it. Meanwhile a population of 160-plus pairs has spread across Scotland and into England.